Pagan Voices: Starhawk, David Salisbury, Ocean, Teo Bishop, and More!

Pagan voices is a new spotlight on recent quotations from figures within the Pagan community. These voices may appear in the burgeoning Pagan media, or from a mainstream outlet, but all showcase our wisdom, thought processes, and evolution in the public eye. Is there a Pagan voice you’d like to see highlighted? Drop me a line with a link to the story, post, or audio.

David Salisbury

“Celebrating Pagan youth doesn’t mean we have to shun our elders. Instead, we can recognize the value of both ends of the age spectrum and what each has to offer. There’s still a strange view in some Pagan communities that our youth are temporary expendables. That we’re only interested in the surface fad of an “alternative lifestyle” or are coming from a shallow, uninformed space. Looking at blogs about the recent news that MTV would like to profile occultists 25 or younger reveals a pessimistic view of young Pagans. “The under-25 age limit ensures this will be a disaster” is a frequent comment going around. My young coreligionists frustrated with this type of dialog have a wish for our communities. We want to let the Pagan world know that we’d like an equal seat at the table. If you give us a chance, you might be surprised by what we can accomplish.” – David Salisbury, from his new PaganSquare blog NextGen Pagan: Paganism for the Next Generation, advocating for younger Pagans to have a seat at the table.

Ocean from Deaf Pagan Crossroads

“Somehow I’m just not sure how much confidence I can have in a diversity officer who seems to allow the teachings of her church to influence her in engaging in actions that might be counterproductive to the role she is expected to carry out on the campus. Don’t get me wrong – it doesn’t bother me that Dr. McCaskill is a Christian. I just hope it doesn’t bother her that I happen to be a Pagan. Or that it bothers the Office of Diversity and Inclusion should a group of Gallaudet students show up with a letter requesting to perform Full Moon Esbats on the campus, or asking to invite yours truly to lead a Dreaming the Dark ritual during the Sabbat of Samhain.” – Ocean at Deaf Pagan Crossroads commenting on the controversy involving Dr. Angela McCaskill, Chief Diversity Officer for Gallaudet University, a federally chartered university for the deaf and hard of hearing located in Washington, DC. McCaskill was put on administrative leave after signing a petition opposing same sex marriage, a move that some believe put her at odds with her position as a diversity officer.

Starhawk at Occupy Santa Cruz. Photo by Matt Fitt, Santa Cruz IMC.

“Here in California, there’s only two more days to register to vote. And if you haven’t, I urge you to do so. Now, I have to say my circles of friends and acquaintances include few if any potential Romney voters. But they do include people who are so disaffected, or feel so frustrated, angry and disempowered by the political system, that even the sheer raw theater of it doesn’t move them to participate. And others who enjoy saying, “Don’t vote, it only encourages them,” which is funny but patently untrue in an election year when the far right is working so hard to discourage people from voting. If they’re going to such lengths to keep people from the polls, there must be something there that we want! […] Elections are not the arena where I express my ideals–I do that in the garden, and in my writing, and in the streets. Elections are where I get pragmatic, because they do matter, and the differences between the candidates can mean life or death to folks like Shawna and to me.” – Pagan author and activist Starhawk, at her Dirt Worship blog, endorsing Barack Obama for President, and explaining why voting is important, even if you’re disillusioned.

Teo Bishop

“But we just created an out there by casting this circle. We closed them off from us, shut them out, but only symbolically because they could see and hear all of what we were doing. Play it like we’re the victims, but we just created — through ritual — the same kind of alienation that we feel in relation to the greater society. We just became The Church.” – Teo Bishop, at his newly independent Bishop In The Grove blog, explaining his discomfort at a recent Pagan Pride Day in Colorado. You can read a follow up, here. Also – be sure to stay tuned for a special column from Teo here at The Wild Hunt exploring these topics further.

Jason Mankey

“I just don’t think the gods, any gods, care at all about politics. I don’t care if that god lives near the star Kolob, once resided in the Holy of Holies, or was worshipped on the Acropolis in the Parthenon of Ancient Athens. I just can’t see gods, divine beings with memories that span millennia, getting all worked up over things that would feel like seconds to them. I think my gods care about me (and that your gods care about you), but I can’t picture Cernunnos reading the latest misleading headline over on The Huffington Post or spending his morning watching Fox and Friends. It’s not that the gods aren’t worried about this world, it’s just that some decisions are made by people, and some things are controlled by higher powers, voting is not one of those things.” – Jason Mankey, at his Raise the Horns blog, opining that perhaps the gods don’t care all that much about politics.

T. Thorn Coyle

“We cannot control our lives. What we can do – by noticing, engaging, and releasing – is stay in active engagement with our lives and the process we are in. We can adjust attitudes, habits, actions, thoughts. We can come into right relationship with emotions. We can learn how to better be a part of community. We can of better service. Control can be a useful concept, but more often than not it becomes a stand in for what actually helps. Think of muscle control. An athlete wants this. But really, what the athlete wants is to engage heart, breath, attention and muscles all at once, so as to move precisely, with strength and flexibility, in the moment. Eventually, this becomes a state of pure presence, the athlete is one with herself and the water, the track, the grass, the mat. We can call that control. I would rather call it engagement. Relationship. Presence. Why? Simply because the concept of control can turn into rigidity of form and attempts to force an outcome.” – T. Thorn Coyle, explaining how “Liberation is a Process.”

Jason Pitzl-Waters

“‘The under-25 age limit ensures this will be a disaster’ is a frequent comment going around.”
I think it’s more likely to be a disaster due to the fact it’s going to be produced by MTV. Sixteen and Pregnant, anyone?
On a different note, I’m very happy for Teo. Independent is the way to go.

kenneth

That’s exactly right. The age of the cast will have very little to do with it. As a “reality show”, it’s going to select cast members who bring the most freak and personal drama to the table. Even if our very best community representatives somehow made it through that filter, the show would be edited and spun to make them look like loons.

Peter Dybing

David is a proven leader in the community. It is great to see his voice given a platform at the Wild Hunt!

http://egregores.blogspot.com Apuleius Platonicus

The Gods may very well not care when it comes to Tweedle-Dum versus Tweedle-Dee. But that may not be all there is to this matter.

“The Gods are concerned about men even when they are dead, and they would wish men still alive to show concern for them, too. Were it not so, they would never have translated those they admired to the Islands of the Blest, nor would they have honored their bones with oracles, as they did with those of Orestes and Theseus. And now, I believe, the Gods in their assemblies have taken note of Julian’s fate and his neglect after death, and they are indignant and call upon each other to avenge him. If Hector deserved to be lamented by Zeus because of his many sacrifices, if Zeus is accused by Athena during the wanderings of Odysseus for neglecting a man who had sacrificed to Him, what were the remarks they made about Julian, do you think, since he in ten years offered more sacrifices than all the rest of the Greeks put together?

“He it was who divided up his life into preoccupations for the state and devotion to the altars, associating with Gods in countless initiations, mourning for our desecrated Temples, while ever mourning was all that he could do, but then, when the opportunity came, taking up arms for them. He restored the ruined Temples to their places, and he restored their ritual to them and all others: he brought back, as it were from exile, sacrifice and libation, and renewed the festivals that had fallen into abeyance. He did away with the danger that was attached to the worship of the higher powers, never allowed his intellect to be diverted form consideration of the Gods, dispersed the mist that enveloped so many, and would have done the same for us all, had he not been untimely taken from us.

“Zeus is concerned for him, an Emperor for an emperor, as one of his own craft: Athena, Zeus’ daughter, also because of his gifts of intellect: Hermes because of his oratory of every kind: the Muses because of his poetry: Artemis, because of his continence, and Ares because of his valour in war.”